The Orchard Keeper

Wheee! I finally finished this book! Which means that I've only started. Now I have a ton of questions... obviously I'll need to do several re-reads. I'm sorry now that I waited so long to read it... I really, truly wasn't interested in reading it at all at first. It really is a fast read, and I might have had time to do an immediate second reading before feeling threatened by my (teetering) to-be-read pile--or at least a closer read (though I don't know that I was ready for a closer read the first time around--one could get mired in the confusing bog of the story--or the furred green pit of it, as it were). Faulkner-esque? Perhaps-ish, but clearly Mr. McCarthy is a brilliant and capable writer in his own right. This is the first book of McCarthy's I've read (it's his first book, too), and now I'm asking myself what took me so long; I've always avoided him because his subjects seem so dark, in that Southern way that makes my skin crawl, and I can take a novel that leaves me feeling disturbed every now and again, but I have to be either up for it or tricked into it...interestingly, I didn't come away from this book with that troubled feeling at all--though some parts rattled me. Perhaps it was McCarthy's exquisitely lush prose, which mesmerized me. I could smell it and taste it.

The characters, John Wesley Rattner, Marion Sylder, and Arthur Ownby (Uncle Ather), possess a certain quality of tragedy, but they are wily and hard to really connect with; however, the post-prohibition-era Tennessee countryside is lush and delicious. The three men are bound together cryptically and inexplicably by a decaying body in "the pit"; the story explores the push and pull between loyalty and love, and destiny and self-determination. It's not quite a 5 out of 5 for me (not yet anyway), just because it was so confusing and therefore hard to read. I still don't feel like I really know what just happened. However, that's not a complete negative in my little book of what-makes-a-best-book-I've-ever-read... it just hints to me how much depth this novel may have lurking beyond its fog-inducing difficulty. This story has many layers, and so much condensed into its stunningly breathtaking descriptions of the Tennessee mountains and eerily realistic rendering of local dialect, that it haunts me... I imagine one could re-read it an infinite number of times and get something more out of it every time. I will be curious to see how well the story continues to thicken and set as I pass through it on subsequent reads. I think I've just become a McCarthy fan.